Existing and proposed watermarking systems for protecting proprietary material such as multimedia content suffer from the fact that they often provide for watermark detection to be performed in the software domain within a personal computer. A personal computer is a device that contains user configurable software and as such, is subject to tampering and insertion of malicious code. Malicious code is capable of helping analyze the watermark and even rendering a watermark ineffective. In some cases, the watermark system utilizes a “key” or reference pattern to perform its detection function. A software version of the detector thus must utilize a software version of the “key” pattern. If this “key” pattern is successfully reverse engineered, it can be used to remove the watermark, thus removing any protection from copying that was previously afforded.